TV Spies

Spies on the tube: air-conditioned supermen

The Avengers face a menacing aerobics class.

By TOM SOTER from COLUMBIA DAILY SPECTATOR May 18,1977

If Dr. Freud is to be believed and childhood influences really are the most important factor in shaping personality, then what can we guess about this year's graduating class? It, more than any previous generation's, waS raised on television. And what message did that black box convey? My memories, at least, are of spies, spies and more spies, all over the tube from the early sixties on. Beginning with programs like Danger Man, the list you could compile demonstrates nicely the old adage, "Nothing succeeds like excess." For example: Secret Agent (serious spies), The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (satirical spies), Get Smart (stupid spies), The Prisoner (captured spies), Mission: Impossible (treacherous spies), Honey West (female spies), and so on. The interesting thing about most of these programs is the set of values they taught us. In their worlds, coolness under pressure counted for more than being right or wrong. And anything that gave the hero the upper hand, be it a fist fight, a shoot-out or a wire-tapping, was o.k. simply because it gave him the upper hand. The Man from U.N.C.L.E., for example, could get out of tight spots not because he was right, but because he was more clever than his foe. Not that there were many moral questions. In almost all of these shows, the good guy could always be clearly discerned, whether he was dashing Napoleon Solo of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, or avenging John Steed of the British Ministry of Defense. In both cases, the hero always got the girl and never expressed any doubts about his role in life. More importantly, he rarely lost control of a situation, and when he did, he quickly got it back again.In The Avengers and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. this fantasy-like situation was aided by fantasy-like adventures. Steed (Patrick Macnee) and his partner, Mrs. Peel (Diana Rigg) , for instance, faced such improbable situations as a huge killer pussycat, a department store which was actually a big bomb, a man-eating plant out to devour England, and a town where murder was the way of life. And in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Solo dealt with a huge stink bomb, murderous mechani cal men, modern-day pirates, menacing amazons, and numerous other nefarious oddities. In each of these situations, the protagonist was both self-assured and clever, which was in· some ways good, and in others, bad. This taught us the necessity for coolness under pressure, but also made problem situations appear too simple. The dilemmas faced by Steed and Solo were certainly not normal ones, and, for that matter, neither were the characters. Were these, then, the proper heroes to emulate-people who led impossible lives and made it look so easy? Couldn't the emulation of such heroes lead to frustration when we grew up and found it wasn't so? Were The Avengers and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. teaching us values that didn't apply to the real world? At least one show seemed to think so. Patrick McGoohan's Secret Agent (and its sequel, The Prisoner) also presented a cool hero. But where Steed and Solo always knew what they'wanted and who was who, McGoohan's John Drake didn't. He was something of an anti-hero, questioning his superior's values and often being openly skeptical of the stated "necessity" for what he was doing. He would call a spade a spade: wire-tapping was wire-tapping, assassination, murder, and we could often see the effects of both on real people.

McGoohan as spy: complex.

It was this emphasis on the real that made Secret Agent the best of the spy lot and one of the more . instructive TV adventure series of the '60's. By showing the sordid side, and stressing the realistic, McGoohan took the glamour out of the spy business, but not all of the heroism. We could believe in and respect his character because he wasn't perfect and he wasn't completely happy. Drake tried and (especially in The Prisoner) could fail. But even in the face of that failure, he kept his wits and his principles about him. He could feel compassion, but he could also subjugate it for a higher ideal. In short, he was a real person. And so were the bad guys, who were often charming and not all bad, and the good guys who were often nasty and not all good. Secret Agent, then, gave us microcosm of the world at large b its presentation of gray heroes an villains who tried to use their head and not their fists to get them out of tight spots. And even when they succeeded, they weren't always sure of the value of their success. It is this uncertainty that make Secret Agent the most instructive of the entertaining spy shows (and The Avengers and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. were certainly entertaining). was the only that tried to teach us what to expect in the world: not simple problems which could be solved with a joke or a gun, but complex ones that sometimes had no satisfying solutions. McGoohan realized that only through a realistic appraisal of the world could one hope to change it. Did his message get across? Will the '70's class benefit from the '6(J spies? Tune in next week, or next year, for the answer . . .

Patrick McGoohan: A Life

from VIDEO, July 1985

Patrick McGoohan knows what he wants. He enters a restaurant, walks with quick determined strides to a coffee machine, and pours himself some coffee. He sits, lights a cigarette, and orders corned beef on rye without glancing at the menu. He looks not unlike the man he was 17 years ago, shouting, "I am not a number! I am a free man!" on The Prisoner TV series, the man about whom Johnny Rivers sang in "Secret Agent Man": "They're givin' you a number and takin' way your name." The face is more lined now, he wears horn-rimmed glasses, and at over six feet, he seems taller than you'd expect. But the eyes are still piercing blue, the large forehead is just as prominent, and the voice – that curious, mid-Atlantic accent that can give an ironic twist to the simplest phrase – is as forceful as ever. He is talking about his TV work because, once again, it is in the news. Maljack Productions/MPI Home Video has just released the first Prisoner episodes on tape and they have sold about 3,000 copies each so far. Secret Agent is to follow. "It was an allegory," he says of The Prisoner. "I am not sure that I can explain everything about it myself. But I was allowing instinct to carry me a certain amount of the way. I knew there were certaiin themes I wanted to go after." Themes like personal identity. Trust. Imagination. Education. All of which keep cropping up in McGoohan's work – his stage role in Ibsen's Brand(for which he was named "best actor" by British critics in 1959), his early film work in The Quare Fellow, his later films like Escape from Alcatraz, and his current performance in Pack of Lies, a Broadway play dealing with betrayal.

Pack of Lies

"I don't want to make any statements," he remarks. "If I did, I would be a minister, a politician. Our first job is to entertain. Entertainment is therapy. But it can be inspiring. It can affect one's life." Certainly that was part of the rationale behind his firsT TV series, Danger Man, which eventually became Secret Agent. The producers wanted a James Bond-type hero, shooting off quips as rapidly as his gun and hopping into bed with a new girl every week. McGoohan had other ideas, however, and after seeing the first script wrote a long letter to the producer of the series, outlining what his character, John Drake, would and would not do. "We eventually did it without any of that rubbish in it," he says, and his strong feelings led to the most unusual – and fascinating – secret agent to appear among the 1960s crop of Napoleon Solos, John Steeds, and Simon Templars. "You never saw me fire a gun," he says proudly. And he never dallied with the damsels. "I said to the producers, 'If I start going with a different girl in each episode, what are those kids going to think out there?" 

McGoohan as Drake 

McGoohan, married to former actress Joan Drummond for over 30 years, with three daughters of his own, feels Drake's morality was his strength. "When one says a moral hero, for some reason it has a sort of prissy sound to it. But you can have a hero of principle who is more of a man than a hero without principle." For McGoohan, it was more important that Drake thought – rather than fought – his way out of tight spots.. "I used this," he says, tapping his forehead. He has always used that brain – almost obsessively. Born in Astoria, New York, in 1928, he grew up in England, entered the British stage in the early 1950s annd TV in the late '50s. "I wanted to get some experience with cameras. It was a great opportunity to learn about production. I used to spend every spare minute in the editing room; I handled cameras myslef. I had plans to use my technicla experience with filmmaking for my own productions. So when the time came, I would know what I was doing." That attention to detail is just as strong in his private life. When he and his eldest daughter made a home movie, for instance, the actor insisted on a script, a budget, then "proper editing, proper music, just as though it were a 35-millimeter film. If you're going to do a painting, you are not going to throw a can of paint at the canvas and hope something sticks. Even if you are not an artist, you should try and put something on the canvas in some sort of order that says something. As opposed to saying, "Well, that doesn't matter.' Because everything matters in the end." 

McGoohan as No. 6

Such ideas culminated in The Prisoner, the story of one man's fight against a dehumanizing system. McGoohan plays Number Six, in one critic's words, "a man of great resource and cunning," a former secret agent who resigns his job and is spirited away to a sea town known only as the Village. Everyone has a number instead of a name. "Nothing can be taken for granted in the Village," noted critic Hank Stine in 1970. "Nothing can be trusted but the self, and paranoia is a stable adjustment." "I'd always had these obsessions in the back of my mind for man in isolation,fight against bureucracy, brainwashing, and numbers," remarks McGoohan. A visit to the Welsh resort town of Portmeirion, with its fairy tale-like buildings, inspired him; a talk with Sir Lew Grade fired him into action. Grade had financed Secret Agent and wanted McGoohan to do another adventure series. "I said, 'I don't want to do anything quite like that. I want to do something different.' He said, 'What?' So I said, 'This.' And I pulledout a script that I had prepared of the first episode of The Prisoner." McGoohan and his Secret Agent cohorts – David Tomblin, George Markstein, Bernard Williams – began work on the series after that. Grade wanted 26 episodes but McGoohan had planned only seven ("I didn't think we could sustain more than that"). Nonetheless, he and Tomblin came up with 10 more script ideas and each of the resulting 17 episodes dealt with the actor's favorite themes, from identity ("The Schizoid Man") and trust ("Checkmate") to elections ("Free for All") and education ("The General").

Patrick McGoohan, with Tom Soter, 1984

In "The General," the Prisoner opposes a brainwashing systeM known as "Speedlearn" that endows its users with a university-level degree in 10 minutes. You might know the facts and figures, argues Number Six, but you know nothing. You are one of many, a "row of educated cabbages." "The right sort of education enables one to think original thoughts," McGoohan says now. "There are people who know something about every subject under the sun. But they are just a reference library. Learning too much stuff, that is closing up your mind. You will find that all the great inventors – Edison, Bell – I can't think of one who was highly educated. The exploration of their mind wasn't surrounded by too much education. The mind is set free. The innate power of creation was there." Similarly, "I don't agree that travel broadens the mind. You have to find out where you live now. How much did Shakespeare travel? Yet it's all in Shakespeare. The world is there. Did he miss out on Broadway? Times Square? The broadening of the mind is here," he says, tapping his head again. "I suppose that's an outrageous statement," he adds, with his characteristic half-smile. "Let's qualify that. I don't think it's an outrageous statement because I think it is true. Somebody else might, though – that is my point. If it is examined, the travel thing, the education thing, I think that at the very least there is a premise for debate about it. And that is always fascinating. "Take The Prisoner. Each person would look at it and I hope have a different interpretation of what it was supposed to be about. That is the intention – to be left hanging somewhat and to lead people to say, 'Well, maybe this was intended.' But as long as they looked at it and thought about it and argued about it, that was the whole concept."

Article as it appeared in Video

The Prisoner Reviewed

Vol. 1 – Vol. 8 A & E Home Video from SCARLET STREET, 2001 Fans of THE X-FILES will find that paranoid series’ spiritual stepfather in THE PRISONER, Patrick McGoohan’s 1967 fantasy series about a secret agent who, upon resigning his job, is kidnapped and taken to a seaside resort town called The Village. The happy Villagers, dressed in colorful garb, are known only by numbers; the ex-spy’s is Number Six. Over the course of a 17-episode run, the hero, played by McGoohan, faces relentless attempts to find out why he resigned his job: Was he selling out? Could it really just have been a matter of principle? Those efforts include various mind games and technological trickery, all usually spearheaded by the Village leader, No. 2 (played by a different actor in most episodes, showing that puppet leaders may change but the totalitarian song remains the same). McGoohan, who devised the series format with George Markstein, was clearly worried about the encroachment of technology on society. The Village, on the surface a collection of quaint 19th century Italianate buildings, is a kind of Disneyland of terror. Beneath the old world charm, No. 6 discovers a wealth of technological marvels, including spy cameras and mind-altering laser beams, making THE PRISONER, a Kafkaesque parable about the dehumanization of man.   But the series is also big on other timeless themes, from identity and trust to elections and education. In “The Schizoid Man,” for instance, No. 2 recruits a double of No. 6 to make him doubt his sanity. “Free for All” is a marvelous satire of the entire election process. “A Change of Mind” satirizes self-help groups and the idea of community outreach, showing that both can be used as the tools of oppressors. In that episode, No. 6 is declared “unmutual” – a menace to society (“Public Enemy No. 6” as he puts it) because of his individualistic ways. In the end, he turns the tables on his captors by using both the suspicion inherent in the Village and the cattle-like attitude of the happy, easily-led Villagers. The series was controversial, as well. Episode 14, “Living In Harmony,” was actually banned by CBS during the series’ original run, paradoxically because it was too violent and too pacifist. The story finds the Prisoner in the American west playing a cowboy who refuses to wear a gun. In “The General,” No. 6 opposes a brainwashing system called “Speedlearn” which endows its users with the knowledge required for a university-level degree in only 10 minutes. You might know the facts and figures, argues No. 6, but can you think original thoughts? Can you reason? Or are you just one of many, a row of “educated cabbages”? (Education reform advocates, are you listening?) Such ideas are first showcased in “Arrival,” the episode which introduces the hero, an unbending moralist who “will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered” whose “life is my own.” Through odd camera angles and quick cuts, director Don Chaffey (JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS), puts the viewer in the hero’s disoriented shoes, where no one – even one-time friends – can be trusted. As the Prisoner, McGoohan is quirky and intelligent, moving like a caged animal. There is talk of a PRISONER movie, but it would be probably a mistake: no one but McGoohan can play this unbending, principled superhero so well. The DVD release of the series – previously issued in less-than-pristine-quality videos and laserdiscs versions by MPI a decade ago – is cause for celebration. Cynical and thought-provoking in a way unusual for much of ‘60s TV, THE PRISONER, at its best, is top-notch television. The transfer quality on the first eight volumes (featuring the initial 14 episodes) is terrific, even better than the limited edition Columbia House videos of two years ago. That said, the extras included in the sets are generally poor. All the DVDs feature the same interactive map of the Village; each also include coming attractions trailers, and some odd foreign film clips. Volume 1 offers the 16-millimeter “alternative version” of “The Chimes of Big Ben,” an escape attempt installment co-starring Leo McKern (RUMPOLE OF THE BAILEY), which was discovered about a decade ago in Canada. Of subpar quality, it has different editing and music, and an extra scene. What could have been included? For starters, there is a superb British multi-part documentary about the show by Stephen Ricks featuring interviews with cast, crew, and other principals. There is also a Canadian television interview with McGoohan himself in which the actor talks extensively about the creation of the series. What DVD viewers will have to settle for, however, is a 25-minute interview with production manager Bernard Williams, included on Vol. 5. Williams is presented in a decidedly no-frills manner: facing an anonymous questioner, he discusses everything from actors and writers to budgets and locations. But the conversation is not for the uninitiated, since it presupposes you know something about THE PRISONER’s history. For instance, there are numerous references to SECRET AGENT (McGoohan’s previous series) and Lew Grade (the head of ITC, the program’s production company) which are sure to leave many confused. There are also flat-out omissions and falsehoods: Williams makes no mention of script editor George Markstein, who co-created the series with McGoohan; and it was Markstein who co-wrote the first script, “Arrival,” not McGoohan as Williams asserts. While there is fascinating stuff in Williams’ talk – the development of the white balloons that menace the Villagers, for instance, shows how luck plays a role in creation – it is shallow stuff compared to what could have been offered. That’s too bad, because THE PRISONER, thought-provoking and entertaining at the same time, deserves better. – Tom Soter

THE PRISONER REDUX for ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, 1996

The latest proof of the adage “old TV series never die, they just get recycled as big-screen, multi-million-dollar remakes” is The Prisoner. Although nothing has been signed, oddsmakers are betting that Mel Gibson will be starring in a 1997 film version of the show that defines the word cult. A 17-episode replacement series for The Jackie Gleason Show in 1968, actor-creator Patrick McGoohan’s bizarre British fantasy series followed the adventures of a former secret agent imprisoned in a seaside village in which everyone has a number not a name. A combination of sixties psychedelia, Franz Kafka, and James Bond, the show is about the individual’s right to be individual, and its many fans include Gibson, who sought out the reclusive 67-year-old McGoohan to play a key role in Braveheart. The Prisoner “was an allegorical conundrum,” says McGoohan, who was paid a seven-figure salary to write the script. “In going for the big screen, one cannot afford the indulgence of allegorical conundrum. It will have a beginning, middle, and end.”

Patrick McGoohan Q & A

In 1988, the magazine Top Secret asked me if it could publish an edited transcript of my 1984 interview with Patrick McGoohan for its premiere issue. I agreed, and here's what it looked like:

McGoohan, In His Own Words

By Tom Soter

from TOP SECRET December 1988

You've called your series family shows. What does that mean? "One of the reasons I didn't want to use excessive violence in Secret Agent or in The Prisoner was because television at that time was certainly a guest in the house. I felt that just as one tries to behave properly as a guest in someone's house, it behooves one in playing on television to behave with a certain amount of - certainly we had fisticuffs and fights in Secret Agent, but we never had any sort of violence that would affect a child in any way or offend grandmother. We just tried to get the stories. I think there was a fairly good standard of story. We did the same kind of thing with The Prisoner. It's more obscure. It's an allegorical piece." How did The Prisoner come about? "I was doing Secret Agent, which in England was called Danger Man, for Lew Grade, now Lord Grade, and I thought we had done enough of the Secret Agents. I went to Lew Grade and said, 'I think we've done enough. We are starting to repeat ourselves a little bit and I'd rather not do anymore.' And he said, 'I'd like you to do another series. Something in the same line, action-adventure.' I said, 'I don't want to do anything quite like that. I want to do something a little different.' And so he said, 'What?' I said, 'This.' And I had my briefcase and I pulled out a script that I had prepared of The Prisoner's first episode. It wasn't entirely complete, only 70 pages, plus an exposition giving what the background, but it had the concept and all that sort of thing. "He said, 'Well, you know I can't read,' one of his jokes, 'Tell me about it.' So I talked about it. This was at six o'clock on a Saturday morning at his office in London where I always used to see him. He used to go to his office at six and I had to get up early anyhow. So I talked for 15 minutes or so and he walked up and down in his office puffing on his Winston Churchill cigar, which he always smokes, and there was a pause. And I thought, 'What is he going to say?' He said, 'You know something, it's so crazy, it might work. When can· we start? How much will it cost? When will you deliver?' I had a budget and a schedule ready. We just shook hands and he said, 'Go.' And I went and did it.' Just like that? "Yes, and he never bothered me. He left me completely alone. I used the same crew that I had on Secret Agent. They were waiting for a phone call from me. So I said, 'Okay, fellas, you're still in business.' And that's what happened. I went out and called my best buddy, who worked all the way through the Secret Agent thing. We started with the same crew." Who is your 'best buddy?' "David Tomblin." He was the producer. "He was the first assistant all through the Danger Man/Secret Agent. We became very close friends, and I needed someone because I was so heavily involved in writing scripts, directing, acting, and of course it was my company that produced it. I needed someone I could utterly rely on, so I asked him if he could be something that would be called the "line producer" in the movie industry. So he was the line producer. "Then I had a marvelous production manager who was also a production manager for Secret Agent. Because I had two guys there I knew I didn't have to worry about minor details, they'd be taken care of. There was no committee to deal with. I don't now where you could get that now. Because if there are any decisions, there are committees, committees everywhere these days. "If there was a decision to be made, either David or Bernard Williams, the production manager, would come on the set where I'd be working and in the break will say, 'Listen, with regards to the next show ... ' They might be talking about sets or they might be talking about costumes. And they say, 'We've got three options, A, B or C. Which one do you want?' And I'd say, 'B. You think that's the right one or not? If it wasn't, 'Well, how about A?' And we'd discuss A. Within five minutes, we'd reached a decision on A, B or C. And they went off and did it. That was the committee meeting. That's all we ever had. That's how everything was done." Did you plan to do 17 episodes? "I had only wanted seven. Today it would be a mini-series, ideally. In those days they didn't have mini-series. Then Lew Grade sold it to CBS and he asked me to come in one of the Saturday mornings and he said, 'Listen, I've sold it, but they'd like more. And I-said, 'I don't think we can sustain more than seven because it is very, y'know, far out is not the word, but it was a bit tenuous, by its very nature. He said, 'We'd like to do 26,' which was sort of a round number in those days. You'd have 13, 26,39. I said, 'ldon't know. Call me Monday morning.' "I went off and met with David [Tomblin] and we worked. We thought and talked the things over the weekend and cooked up another 10 story lines. Just ideas, two or three lines each. I called him and said, 'We can get another 10 for you, I reckon, by stretching it. Then I regard most of it as padding.' Then we had to try to not make them padding, try and make them true episodes. And so we got the writers working on them. And that's what we did." Were you satisfied with the other episodes? "Some of them weren't too bad." There were some unusual ones, like "The Girl Who Was Death." "That's correct, you caught on." And "Living in Harmony." "You got it, right on the button. Those were the difficulties we had. It is not everybody that noticed what you notice. You are right on the button. Congratulations." The Village is in Wales, isn't it? "Yes. A place called Portmerion in North Wales." How did you find it? "I went there when we were shooting some locations for the first series, Danger Man, and we actually spent three hours in this village because we needed something that looked Italian. I remember I did a lot of driving around in an Aston Martin and then walking around. I said, 'Has this ever been used in the movies?' The answer was no and I said to myself, 'I am going to stick it in the back of my mind, maybe one day .. .' "So then we had a vacation about a year later and I took my family there. While we were there I wandered around. [ got to know it like the back of my hand. I always had obsessions in the back of my mind for man in isolation, fight against bureaucracy, brainwashing, numbering, and all this sort of stuff. And I put the two together. That's how it evolved." Many have said that the last Prisoner was outrageous. "I intended it to be. The intention was to leave people hanging somewhat and to leave people to say, 'Well, maybe this was intended.' But as long as they looked at it, thought about it and argued about it, that was the whole concept. It was easy for me to tie that thing up and give it a James Bond ending. There was a riot in England when they saw the last episode. They expected when the Number One guy was to be revealed, he'd be one of those James Bond heavies with the shaven head and the gold or steel teeth. They were outraged." Instead he had a gorilla mask. "Yeah, all that nonsense. Because it's an allegory. And you-as much as anyone I've spoken to-understands what, by spotting those episodes and saying what you've said, you obviously have a pretty good idea of what it was intended to be." You once said that Drake in Secret Agent should be a moral hero. Why? "You see, this is the thing-when one says a 'moral hero' for some reason it has a rather prissy sound to it, which it isn't actually intended. You can have a hero with principle who is more of a man than a hero without principle. You see it was difficult for them because secret agents don't have much principle. They are not allowed to. James Bond has no principles whatsoever. So it was difficult when something came up in the storyI'd say, 'He wouldn't do that.' And they'd say, 'Secret agents do that all the time.' This secret agent won't do it. "I never carried a gun, ever. You never saw me fire a gun. I outwitted them with this (Taps his head). I said, 'I won't do the series if we're going to have anything of that sort.' The very first script I read-which I didn't do-had a guy lying on a bed and it had a girl who was some sort of a Russian agent. He says, 'Now what we're going to do is find that safe and conquer the combination.' He reached up to the picture-this was all in the script though we didn't do it and lowers the picture. The safe's behind it. He rolls over on top of her and says, 'I can't quite reach the combination.' "I saw this and had to make it very clear. This is the first episode of the first ever Danger Man. I sat down and I wrote a letter to them sort of saying, 'This ain't it.' They had to re-think it a bit and then we did it without any of that rubbish. "I mean, let James Bond do that. I don't want to. This was television, in film it would be different. My whole point is that if it were today it wouldn't matter. The infant, the seven, eightyear-old child knows how to work those things and they can switch them to see anything. You see X-rated stuff in your living room. "That's how it happened. I don't think it made Drake a less interesting character because he didn't carry a gun or because he did not roll into bed with every girl he clapped eyes on. If that's being moral, that's the way it had to be." What scares you the most? You said in a recent interview that doing the play, Pack of Lies, scares you. "Well, you've only got to look at the movie My Favorite Year. That's what it's about. Because there are no retakes. You're out there and you're exposed, which I think is good. It's a good challenge and that's scary. Twenty-five years is a long time to be away from this particular medium and it's a different technique. One tries to feel one's way back into it." Is there some role that scares you? "You mean a challenging role that I'd like to do or that scares me?" Yes. When you may say, 'I don't know if I can handle that.' Do you ever say that? "The only roles I say that to are bad ones. And what roles? King Lear? I may have a stab at King Lear in the near future. I don't know. It doesn't scare me too much. I only think Shakespeare's been done too much. I had my time in -Shakespeare. I've done all that for now. At a future time it may come up again." People know you from Secret Agent and The Prisoner. In the Broadway play, Pack of Lies, you're once again playing a spy. Have you ever felt trapped by the roles you play? "I never thought of it like that. I think it's totally disassociated from Secret Agent. The character in Pack of Lies is a civil servant, which is quite different. He doesn't go out on assignments to Tel Aviv or Istanbul. He's the guy at home there in London. He works a lot of the time, I imagine"out. It's not really related to the Secret Agent chap at all. He's probably a very conservative chap. He's based on an actual character, and I would guess that he's retired now, somewhere up in the country. And he probably reads the London Timesev.ery day and might have a few investments in the Financial Times. He probably putters around doing a bit of gardening. He is probably a very conservative chap, dressed in tweeds." McGoohan in 1984. He is very different from Secret Agent's John Drake. "That's my point. Where do secret agents go when they are finished? Not like that. They don't go that way. Most of them end psychotic messes. It's a very strange occupation. Most of them don't look like Sean Connery. Most of them look like someone you might be passing down the street. You won't look twice." Sort of like Harry Palmer. Actually, most of the Secret Agents have the quality of the film The Ipcress File - that gritty realism. "Yeah, that may be." Did you know any spies? "No, I stay well away from them. The only spies I know are in the movie industry. There are a lot in that...lots."

The Prisoner

from STARLOG, October 1988

The Prisoner is 20 this year. More exactly, it was 20 years ago this past summer that American television audiences first viewed Patrick McGoohan' s controversial, 17-part fantasy series, The Prisoner. It was the show that took paranoia seriously, and in the process inspired fan clubs and debates as well as adulation from followers as diverse as Isaac Asimov and Mick Jagger. It is a spy story and an allegory, Franz Kafka blended into John Le Carre, with just a dash of H.G. Wells. The Prisoner has been called brilliant and inspired, simple-minded and old hat. No one has dared call it dull. Certainly not Patrick McGoohan, the actor who played the man-of-principle protagonist, Number Six, a secret agent who resigns his jo b and finds himself trapped in a remote, seaside hamlet known only as The Village. There, no one has names, only numbers, and the happy faces and carnival atmosphere mask a dark truth: everyone in The Village is a prisoner, kept there because they know too much or won't reveal enough. And, explains the ruling Number Two to Number Six: "In here, you only have a certain amount of time to give us what we want before we take it." Lies, treachery and torture are all part of life in The Village. "Nothing can be taken for gr~ted," noted critic Hank Stine in 1970. "Nothing can be trusted but the self, and paranoia is a stable adjustment." Unusual? Yes, but so is McGoohan, the star, executive producer and guiding force behind the series. New York-born of Irish parents, he is 60 now, but stilI looks like the man he was 20 years ago, shouting, "I am not a number! I am a free man!" in the series' prologue. The face is more lined, he wears horn-rimmed glasses, and at over six feet, seems taller than one would expect. But the eyes are still piercing blue, the large forehead is just as prominent, and the voice is as forceful as ever. His TV work is in the news once again as it has been almost continuously since its debut. Besides the endless reruns of The Prisoner on network, local and public broadcasting stations, MPI Home Video rele.ased the entire series on tape (as well as six episodes of McGoohan's earlier Secret Agent) and they broke records in their first months of sale. More than 3,000 people in 38 countries have joined Six of One, the Prisoner Appreciation Society, and Warner Books has just published The Official Prisoner Companion. And in 1987, CBS announced plans (subsequently aborted) for a new version of the show. "It won't lay down and die," the late George Markstein, script editor for the series, noted in an interview in Dial. "It has haunted me here in the States. I switch on the television and there's the damned Prisoner." "It's an allegory," adds McGoohan, as though that would explain its continuing popularity. "I am not sure that I can explain everything about it myself. But I was allowing instinct to carry me a certain amount of the way. I knew there were certain themes I wanted to go after." Themes like personal identity, trust, imagination, education and more keep cropping up in McGoohan's work, including his stage role in Henrik Ibsen's Brand (for which he was named "best actor" by British critics in 1959), his early film work in The Quare Fellow (1962), his later movies like Escape from Alcatraz (1980) and his Broadway debut in Pack of Lies (1985), a play dealing with betrayal. "I don't want to make any statement," he remarks. "If I did, I would be a minister, a politician. Our first jop is to entertain. Entertainment is therapy, but it can be inspiring. It can affect one's life." Passing Sentence Certainly that was part of the rationale behind his first TV series, Danger Man, which eventually became Secret Agent. The producers wanted a James Bond-type hero. McGoohan had other ideas. "I didn't want to use excessive violence in Secret Agent," he explains, "because television at the time was certainly a guest in the house. I felt that just as one tries to behave properly as a guest, it behooves one playing on television to behave properly. Certainly we had fisticuffs, but we never had any sort of violence that would affect a child in any way or offend a grandmother." In fact, after seeing the first script for Danger Man, McGoohan wrote a long letter to the producers, Lew Grade's lTC, outlining what his character, John Drake, would and would not do. "We eventually did it without any of that rubbish in it."

Promotion for Secret Agent.

His strong feelings led to the most unusual and fascinating secret agent to appear among the 1960s crop of Napoleon Solos, John Steeds and Simon Templars. "You never saw me fire a gun," McGoohan says proudly. And he never dallies with the. damsels. "I said to the producers, 'If I start going with a different girl in each episode, what are those kids going to think out there?' They would say, 'Secret agents do that all the time.' And I'd say, 'This secret agent won't do it.' " McGoohan, married to former actress Joan Drummond for more than 30 years, with three daughters and grandchildren of his. own, feels Drake's morality was his strength. "When one says 'a moral hero,' for some reason, it has a sort of prissy sound to it. But yoµ can have a hero with principle who is more of a man than a hero without principle." For McGoohan, it was more important that Drake thought-rather than fought-his way out of tight spots. "I used this," he says, tapping his forehead. He had his way, through 39 half-hour episodes and 47 hour installments before taking another unusual step: cancelling his own show. "I felt we had done enough of the Secret Agents," he notes, even though at the time the series was one of England's most successful exports and had made McGoohan the highest paid actor on English television. "I went to Lew Grade and said, 'I think we've done enough. We're starting to repeat ourselves a little bit, and I'd rather not do any more.' And he said, 'I'd like you to do another series, something in the same line, action-adventure.' I told him, 'I want to do something a little different.' 'What?' I said, 'This,' and gave him a script for the first episode of The Prisoner. " It was the combination of a number of different ideas by a number of different people. "I've always been interested in the fact that all people are prisoners," George Markstein reflected in Dial in 1978. "Some prisons are prettier than others-a movie star is the prisoner of his face, for example. I also wondered what happens to a secret agent who is in possession of sensitive knowledge and wants to retire. Everyone thinks there's an ulterior motive-you're writing a hot memoir or selling out to the other side. If he wants to quit, certain things may happen." He may have been Number Six In The Village, but McGoohan was Number One on the set-and Just as mysterious. As both Paddy Fitz and Joseph Serf, he contributed extra episodes. Markstein, who had been a script editor on Secret Agent and a former intelligerice man himself, huddled with McGoohan, who had his own ideas about what he wanted to put forward in the new program. "I had always had these obsessions in the back of my mind for man in isolation, fighting against bureaucracy, brainwashing and numbers," McGoohan notes.

The "Green Dome," No. 2's residence in The Village, aka Portmeirion, Wales.

For a setting, the actor had selected Portmeirion, a Welsh resort town four-and-ahalf hours from London that he visited in 1960 while shooting an episode of Danger Man. "We actually spent three hours in this vilIage . because we needed something that looked Italianate," McGoohan recalls. Built by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis in the 1930s, Portmeirion is a hodgepodge of architectural styles, with fairy tale-like buildings and grounds. It had been frequented by George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill, among others, and McGoohan and Markstein both felt it would be the perfect spot for their story. "It was ideal for a disorientation operation like The Village," noted Markstein in Dial. "The architecture is completely crazy." Lew Grade gave the go-ahead. Besides Markstein, McGoohan' employed most of the production people from Secret Agent, including David Tomblin, who served as producer. "He was a first assistant [director] all throughout the Danger Man/Secret Agent thing," says McGoohan. "We became very close friends, and I needed someone because I was so heavily involved in writing scripts, directing, acting, and, of course, it was my company [Everyman Films, founded in 1960, with Tomblin] that produced it. I needed someone I could utterly rely on." Serving Time To say he was involved is an understatement, however, since McGoohan had his finger in everything, from casting and (re)writing to editing, directing and even arranging the musical score. He directed three episodes under his own name, and did a couple under pseudonyms (Paddy Fitz and Joseph Serf), but all the shows bore his undeniable stamp and dealt with his favorite themes, from identity ("The Schizoid Man") and trust ("Checkmate") to elections ("Free for All") and education ("The General"). In "The General," the Prisoner opposes a brainwashing system known as "Speedlearn" that endows its users with a university-level degree in JO minutes. You might know the facts and figures, argues Number Six, but you really know nothing. You are one of many, a "row of educated cabbages." "The right sort of education enables one to think original thoughts," McGoohan says. "There are people who know something about every subject under the sun, but they are just a reference library. Learning too much stuff, that is closing up your mind. You'll find that all the great inventors- Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell-I can't think of one who was highly educated. The explorations of their minds weren't surrounded by too much education. The mind is set free. The innate power of creation was there."

A Prisoner postcard from the 1990s.

During the creation of The Prisoner, the actor was stretched very thin. "He was in a state of exhaustion," Norma West, an actress in "Dance of the Dead," observed to Six of One, the Prisoner club. "He never went home-he slept in his dressing room and hardly ate. He was a driven man in the end." So were the cast members. Leo McKern, who played Number Two in three episodes, had a near breakdown during the intense, one-on-one scenes he did with McGoohan in "Once Upon a Time." Vincent Tilsey, a scriptwriter for the series, recalls bitter battles between Markstein and McGoohan over scripts. "[McGoohan is] an egocentric-he has a terrific amount of push. With someone as sensitive as Markstein around, it was inevitable they would argue. I can't think how they got together in the first place." (Markstein, incidentally, appears in the opening credits, as the man behind the desk to whom McGoohan angrily presents his resignation.) "There were personality clashes within the team," notes Larry Hall, a founding member of Six of One. "Markstein wanted a very straightforward action-adventure series. It was McGoohan who brought in things like the enormous balloons which chase people and smother them to death, and penny-farthing bicycles, and the general look of the series. I think he and Markstein were at each others' throats towards the end, and in fact, Markstein left the series." Other problems arose. Rover, for instance, the surreal guardian of the VilIage, was originally a modified car that was meant to run on land and water. Although a great deal of money had been spent, it sank to the ocean bottom on its first time out. A quick improvisation produced one of the series' more memorable trademarks: the production manager hurried to a nearby air force base and purchased large weather balloons to play the guardians of The VilIage's gate. Thousands were ultimately used. Production had begun in September 1966 with Don Chaffey shot the first four episodes "Arrival," "Free for All," "Dance of the Dead" and "Checkmate," and part of the fifth, "Chimes of Big Ben," on location. "I was involved with all the early shooting," Chaffey reported in a 1984 British documentary on the series. "In fact, I was the only director at Portmeirion. I shot up there for five episodes, then came to the studios and shot the remainder of those episodes, and also shot a lot of material that could be used by other directors afterwards." Dozens of local residents-farmers, schoolteachers, even a sea captain-were paid 50 shillings a day as extras, yet no' one outside of McGoohan and his closest associates seemed to know what it was all about. "I do remember that the atmosphere was quite extraordinary," actress Norma West told Six of One. "We didn't realize it was going to be so successful, but we did realize what a different feel it had to it. It was very mysterious, and you began to feel a little strange yourself." When the show premiered in Britain in 1967, it was like nothing ever screened before, and the pressure began mounting on McGoohan and company to bring the episodes in more quickly and more cheaply. The Prisoner was the most expensive program on British TV at the time and the crew was taking up to six weeks per episode. McGoohan claims "he had only wanted [to do] seven [episodes]. Today, it would be a mini-series, ideally. But in those days, they didn't have mini-series. Then, Lew Grade sold it to CBS and he said, 'Listen, I've sold it, but they would like more.' I told him, 'I don't think we can sustain more than seven because it is a bit tenuous. You spend too long with it and you can ruin it.' " Grade wanted 26, but McGoohan compromised at 17, "and that's stretching it," he notes. Roger Langley, in his The Making of The Prisoner, reports, however, that 30 episodes were planned all along, and that Grade'pulled the plug after the sixteenth, "Once Upon a Time," because the series was running way over budget and behind schedule. One episode, "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling," was even shot without McGoohan because he was in America filming lee Station Zebra (1968), while "The Girl Who Was Death" and "Living in Harmony" were plotted and scripted very quickly, hardly utilizing The Village at all.

The Prisoner runs for office in "Free for All," an early episode.

The last installment, "Fall Out," was written in 48 hours in 1968 and completed only two weeks before broadcast. McGoohan, who wrote and directed it, was so pressed that he let a major speech be written by the actor who delivered it, Kenneth Griffith. The show was widely attacked for its enigmatic conclusion, which did not clearly answer any of the mysteries the series had posed. "It would have been easy for me to tie that thing up and give it a James Bond end," observes McGoohan. "There was a riot in England when they saw the last episode, because they expected when the Number One guy was to be revealed, he would be one of those James Bond heavies with the shaven head and the gold or steel teeth. They were outraged because it was an allegory." Getting Parole The response in America was equally heated, although everyone agreed on one point: McGoohan's hero was unique because he was a failure. Michael Dann, the programmer who bought the show for CBS, observed at the time: "From a production point-of-view, I thought The Prisoner was the most extraordinary film I had ever seen. It has style, taste, quality, and it's quite sophisticated. But I told [McGoohan] that no matter how brilliant the production, the public likes to identify with a winner. He listened to me-':"'he gave me a very understanding ear-but he was dedicated to his concept and I didn't win my point." Others, however, found Number Six's failure to escape The VilIage a plus. "What is so noble about success?" asked Isaac Asimov in a humorous analysis in 1968. "How many people can be successful? .. We can't all succeed, but we can all fail." The series also drew heat because of its unusual messages. In "Living in Harmony," for instance, the Prisoner finds himself a former sheriff in the American West and refuses to wear a gun, certainly a controversial stance in 1968 America with rioting in the streets over the Vietnam War. CBS did not broadcast the episode. Yet its predictions of an alienated, dehumanized society were eerily on-target as America headed into the Richard Nixon/ Watergate era. Noted Markstein in Dial, "What is worrying is that we now accept things that once sent shivers up and down our spines on The Prisoner. Closed circuit surveilIance is accepted. So is having a number; every time you want to buy something, you have to ask a computer if it's OK." The Prisoner following has grown, as well. Stewart Niemeier, a college professor who taught a class analyzing the series, has called The Prisoner "television's first genuine work of art," although others do not agree. "I am not sure that the whole series has the discipline that is the basic necessity of a work of art," Anthony Skene, a Prisoner writer, reflected in the Six of One Magazine. Added series writer Vincent Tilsey in the ' same forum: "In the few episodes I saw, Number Six was incorruptible. He was perfect-but that is just the sort of man who cracks up. . .. A television audience might well prefer a perfect man, but, for me, The Prisoner falls short of a work of art by having this lifeless figure." Still, Niemeier calls Number Six "a symbol of high values. He is capable of comprehending the mysteries that surround him. Each segment attacks Number Six's integrity and completeness and he is capable of defeating these attacks."

McGoohan in 1984.

And McGoohan? After The Prisoner, he went to America, starred in films, won an Emmy for a Columbo appearance, and starred in a short-lived medical show, Rafferty, In 1985, when he appeared in Pack of Lies, he admitted he was writing a sort-of sequel to The Prisoner "related to the theme of how one can become a prisoner of violent circumstances and bureaucracy. It's a very distant extension [of the series, set] 200 years in the future." More recently, however, various TV producers have discussed ideas for a new Prisoner. CBS commissioned a pilot script from Roderick (Otherworld) Taylor, to be produced by Lelan Rogers of the Kenny Rogers Organization. "Rogers was given the OK to produce the pilot," notes Bruce Clark, the Pennsylvaniabased American coordinator for Six of One. "But if a series resulted, that would be run by ITC [the copyright holder]. It was a oneway street. He took all the risks, stuck his neck out, and if it was popular, they would take it away from him. As far as McGoohan was concerned, I don't think there were any plans to include him." The project subsequently fell through, although the script exists. An even stranger story surfaced in a British magazine, which reported that a group of European TV companies were being asked to back a pilot episode for a 12~part series based on The Prisoner. The proposed show would shift the locale from The Village to The City, and would follow the adventures of Number Six's son. Although ITC denied that report, it is typical of the kind of mystery and debate that has surrounded The Prisoner on screen and off since the moment of its birth. All of which does not displease the man behind it. "There is a game you can play with friends," says Patrick McGoohan. "In it, you say something deliberately outrageous, like, 'Travel broadens the mind? What a lot of garbage.' Then, that lets him loose and he says, 'Now wait a minute, I'll tell you where I went and learned something that I couldn't have learned anywhere else on Earth.' This guy makes his point, and then, you have a premise for debate. With The Prisoner, each person would look at it and, I hope, have a different interpretation of what it is supposed to be about. That's the intention: to be left hanging somewhat. As long as they looked at it, and thought about it, and argued about it-well, that was the whole concept."

Another Look at The Prisoner

from MD, November 1988 

'"What do you want?"

"Information. "

"You won't get it."

"By hook or by crook, we will."

"Who are you?"

"The new Number Two."

"Who is Number One?"

"You are Number Six."

"I am not a number! I am a free man!"

(Sinister laughter)

This is not a scene from Kafka or Orwell, but from commercial television. It's the introductory sequence to what could be the most controversial- and popular-TV program of the last two decades. Dubbed "The Prisoner," this 17part British fantasy series has not only inspired 3,000 people in 38 countries to join Six of One: "The Prisoner" Appreciation Society, it has also created a cottage industry as prolific as the show is (occasionally) profound. Warner Books has just released The Official Prisoner Companion, close on the heels of The Making of the Prisoner, The Prisoner Files, The Prisoner of Portmeirion, a Prisoner comic book, and a record album. In 1984 MPI Home Video broke sales records when it released all 17 episodes on tape, as well as an 18th "lost" show-approximately 3,000 copies of each episode were sold within only three months. And a 1987 poll of science fiction writers, critics, and fans voted "The Prisoner" one of the 10 best science fiction TV series ever (joined by "Star Trek," "Twilight Zone," and "Outer Limits"). Not surprising, then, that last year CBS-TV would commission a pilot script for a new version (since abandoned), or that University of Toronto professor Stewart Niemeier once taught a popular course on the meaning of the show. "It is," he said, "television's first genuine work of art."

Art or hokum, "The Prisoner" is 20 this year. It premiered in June, 1968, on CBS and has never. since left the airwaves: first on network, then local and public TV stations, and now on cable. "It won't lay down and die," George Markstein, script editor for the series, observed in 1978. "I switch on the television and there's the damned 'Prisoner'." Other shows have developed cult followings - "Star Trek," "The Honeymooners," "I Love Lucy," to name a few-but none has done it with so few episodes and such a murky message. "'The Prisoner'," wrote John Corry in The New York Times in 1986, "is just possibly the most provocative action-adventure series ever filmed, a bleak vision of technology and totalitarianism joined."

Why is it so popular? What does it all mean? Certainly the first episode seems straightforward enough, at least in the beginning. In it, a secret agent (Patrick McGoohan) quits his job and is promptly imprisoned in a carnival-like seaside town known only as The Village. "A lot of people are curious about what lies behind your resignation," observes the Village leader, Number Two. "You had a brilliant career, your record is impeccable. They want to know why you suddenly left." A simple John Ie Carre premise soon becomes a pastiche of Kafka by way of John Stuart Mill. Prisoner Number Six (no names,please, only numbers) finds escape impossible: He is stopped by surveillance devices and a bizarre living weather balloon known as Rover. What's more, his very identity is challenged. For in The Village, the happy faces and carnival atmosphere mask the dark truth that everyone is a prisoner, kept there because they know too much or won't reveal enough. Lies, torture, and treachery are a way of life. "Nothing can be taken for granted in The Village," noted critic and novelist Hank Stine in 1970. "Nothing can be trusted but the self, and paranoia is a stable adjustment." The series soon develops into an epic statement of individuality, of one man against a destructive, prying system. 

The Prisoner (Patrick McGoohan) runs for election in The Village.

Unusual? Yes, but then so is McGoohan, the star, executive producer, and guiding force behind the series. Tired of formula, he revolutionized the TV spy genre in his first series, "Danger Man" (U.S. title: "Secret Agent"). The producers wanted a James Bond clone, but Me Goo han produced what he dubs a "moral hero," a man who thinks his way out of scrapes. And, in a time of Bondian bed hopping, McGoohan's character, John Drake, was firmly celibate. "I said to the producers, 'If I start going with a different girl in each episode, what are those kids , going to think out there?'" he recalls. "You can have a hero with principle who is more of a man than a hero without principle." That, in McGoohan's mind, was the driving idea behind his sequel to "Secret Agent." Tired of the action-adventure format and the most popular and highest paid TV actor in Britain in 1966, McGoohan convinced the head of ITC television to let him turn the genre on its head with "The Prisoner," action-adventure, but in the Sartre mold.

It all grew out of McGoohan's ideas and those of his colleague, George Markstein, a script editor on "Secret Agent" and a former spy himself. 'Tve always been interested in the fact that all people are prisoners," Markstein said in 1978. "Some prisons are prettier than others: A movie star is the prisoner of his face, for example. I also wondered what happens to a secret agent who is in possession of sensitive knowledge and wants to retire. Everyone thinks there's an ulterior motive, that you're writing a hot memoir or selling out to the other side. If you want to quit, certain things may happen." McGoohan had a location in mind that would add greatly to the series' surreal image: the Welsh resort town Portmeirion, a hodgepodge of architectural styles. "It was," Markstein once noted, "ideal for a disorientation operation like The Village. The architecture is completely crazy."

Every year hundreds of fans take over Portmeirion for a "Prisoner" weekend. They are nothing if not obsessive, analyzing the meanings of the 17 episodes in seminars, newsletters, and even a slick quarterly magazine. All of this led columnist Marvin Kitman to observe in New York Newsday: "I admire 'Prisoner' fans, a very high-level group. They are the Mensa of TV viewers .... Half of the 250,000 day visitors a year, it is estimated, have come ... to Portmeirion ... because of 'The Prisoner'." The series itself was tightly controlled by McGoohan, who wrote and directed many episodes, supervised the editing and casting, and even reorchestrated the music. Almost every episode deals with a favorite McGoohan theme, from identity ("The Schizoid Man") and trust ("Checkmate") to elections ("Free for All") and education ("The General").

No. 6 returns home.

But the series' popularity stems from its approach as well as its messages. Standard action-adventure sequences, witty dialogue, and wonderful performances are mixed in with cryptic meanings. In fact, some shows are as straightforward as anything you'd see on "Starsky and Hutch""It's Your Funeral" finds Number Six trying to stop an assassination attempt-while others are as murky as Camus ("Dance of the Dead") or as off-the-wall as Pirandello ("The Girl Who Was Death"). Many were controversial: "Living in Harmony" preached pacifism at the height of the Vietnam War, while "The General" argued against formal education as uncreative.

Such ideas made "The Prisoner" unique, and many claim the series' fame rests on this inspiring pessimism: Society is bad and will get you, but you can still fight back. "'The Prisoner'," observed TV critic Manuel Escott, "poses important questions about the nature of freedom and the need to cling to one's individuality under powerful pressures to conform. 'I will not be stamped, debriefed, filed, indexed, or numbered!' Number Six shouts defiantly at his tormentors-a cry that finds a sympathetic echo in the ears of everyone who has hassled with a computer foul-up." Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov felt the show's popularity had another explanation. In a 1968 essay he cited Number Six's many failed escape attempts and concluded: "What is so noble about success? How many people can be successful? We can't all succeed, but we can all fail; and in this common, universal failure, we can find the brother hood of man we all seek, the true equality at last."

Yet McGoohan feels the answer is not that cut and dried: "With 'The Prisoner,' each person would look at it and, I hope, have a different interpretation of what it's supposed to be about," he says. "That's the intention-to be left hanging somewhat. As long as they looked at it, and thought about it, and argued about it-well, that was the whole concept."

A LOOK BACK By TOM SOTER This is the last of several pieces I wrote on The Prisoner and Patrick McGoohan between 1977 and 1988 (I would subsequently review the show, as well, and write about it in my second book). I had first watched the series in 1970 and became obsessed with it as a teenager, an obsession which led to my meeting and interviewing star/creator Patrick McGoohan in 1984 and visiting Portmeirion – The Village - and other series locations (such as the underground car park that McGoohan drives into during the opening credits sequence) in 1990. Naturally, as most writers do, I recycled ideas and clever phrases from one article to the next. (See also https://tomsoter.com/?q=node/226, https://tomsoter.com/?q=node/339, https://tomsoter.com/?q=node/669, https://tomsoter.com/?q=node/132, https://tomsoter.com/?q=node/499, https://tomsoter.com/?q=node/105, https://tomsoter.com/?q=node/739)

He Was Not a Number

Patrick McGoohan has been a particular obsession of mine. Between 1977 and 2001, I wrote a number of articles on the TV program The Prisoner and its star Patrick McGoohan  (I would subsequently write about the man and his work in both of my books). I had first watched the show in 1970 and became fascinated with it as a teenager, an obsession that led to my meeting and interviewing McGoohan in 1984 and visiting Portmeirion – The Village - and other series locations (such as the underground car park that McGoohan drives into during the opening credits sequence) in 1990. He did other work – some wonderful guest stints on Columbo, a turn as George Bernard Shaw in The Best of Friends, strong performances in The Quare Fellow, Ice Station Zebra, and Escape from Alcatraz, - but way too many villains (most recently, Longshanks in Braveheart). McGoohan's cool demeanor led him easily into the casting directors's view of villainy. But his cool was best when it served a nobler purpose, as shown in his little-seen 1970s medical TV series Rafferty and, most notably, in Danger Man (Secret Agent), where he apeared as the cool, but moral – and sympathetic – spy John Drake. He was a true blue hero, and when McGoohan died in January 2009, part of my childhood died with him. He was not a particularly warm man, but he was an inspiring one. He is missed.

September 19, 2010

McGoohan and Me

MEETING McGOOHAN 

BY TOM SOTER

There were three icons in my formative years (ages 12-17): Basil Rathbone, Sean Connery, and Patrick McGoohan. all of them were cool under pressure, all were men of action, and all were (fortunately or unfortunately) role models. Rathbone was, of course, Sherlock Holmes, Connery was James Bond, but McGoohan – well, he was special. He was the "Secret Agent Man," as Johnny Rivers's song put it in Secret Agent (aka Danger Man), he was No. 6 in The Prisoner, who would "not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered," who cried out, defiantly, "I am not a number, I am a free man." For a shy teenager, McGoohan's stubborn defiance of convention was breathtaking. Being McGoohan-like – aloof, taciturn, defiant of conventions – was making the shy guy into the cool dude.

I finally met the Great Man in December 1984. My editor at Video magazine knew of my fascination with McGoohan. The actor was appearing in his first Broadway stage production, Pack of Lies and would be available for an interview.

But there would be restrictions: he would only sit for 15 minutes, and I could not use a tape-recorder unless he okayed it. The interview was to take place on a Monday. I carefully prepared my questions and eagerly anticipated the big day. It came. He didn't. I got a call from his representative: "Mr. McGoohan is terribly sorry, but could he postpone the meeting until Wednesday?" Of course, of course. Wednesday rolled by, but McGoohan, once again, did not. "Mr. McGoohan is terribly sorry, but could he postpone the meeting until Friday?" Naturally, naturally. When Friday came, the call was expected. But this time, the interview was changed to Saturday, and when Saturday rolled around, there was no call of cancellation. I went to the designated meeting place, a dance/rehearsal studio on Broadway and 20th Street. I went in and was told to wait in a dressing room for Mr. McGoohan, who would be with me shortly. Could this be happening? "Excuse me?" said a young man who appeared seemingly from nowhere,"What's your full name?"

I cleared my throat. "Ah, Tom Soter."

The young man nodded and went away. Outside the room, I heard muffled words. Then the young man returned, followed by a towering, wrinkled, slightly stooped figure.

"Mr. Soter, Mr. McGoohan." He was much taller than I expected, over six feet, though the stooped walk covered it. He was clutching a book to his chest, the script for Pack of Lies. His face was lined, his forehead large, his eyes – peering through horn-rimmed glasses – quite blue.

Pack of Lies: his first and last Broadway show.

"So, it's about The Prisoner you want to talk?"

"Yes."

He laughed quietly. "Well, I hope I can remember something about it," he quipped, adding: "It puzzled quite a few people, myself included, which was the point."

He stared ahead, a classic enigma wrapped in a riddle, not unlike his character in The Prisoner. He suggested I conduct the interview at a neighborhood coffee shop that he had been eating at regularly during rehearsal breaks for the play. During the walk over, he made small talk. "We're at that awkward stage when you've just learned the lines and therefore haven't been able to do anything with them." He noted, however, that the play was in good shape as a production because it ran for a year in England and didn't need to be rethought. That was good, he added, because he found the challenge of acting in his first Broadway play sufficient. He had not appeared on the stage in over 25 years.

When we entered the restaurant, he nodded "hello" to all the waitresses, who smiled at him as if they knew him. A waitress came over and asked if we were ready. "I know what I want," he said, without consulting the menu. He lit a cigarette and ordered corned beef on rye. He turned to me after I had ordered. I took out my tape-recorder. He hardly seemed to notice it. "Okay?" I asked. He nodded. "Fine, fine." So much for eccentricity. To start off, I admitted to him that I had always been a great fan of his work. He smiled slightly, perhaps pleased, perhaps embarrassed. Then he began talking about fans – about children watching his shows.  

McGoohan, with Leo McKern (right), in The Prisoner.

"That's one of the reasons I didn't want to use excessive violence on Secret Agent or The Prisoner. Television at the time was certainly a guest in the house. I felt that just as someone behaves properly towards a guest, it behooves one in playing on television to behave with a certain amount of – certainly we had fisticuffs and fights in Secret Agent but we certainly never had any sort of violence that would affect a child in any way or offend grandmother." The producers wanted a James Bond-type hero, shooting off quips as rapidly as his gun and hopping into bed with a new girl every week. McGoohan had other ideas, however, and after seeing the first script wrote a long letter to the producer of the series, outlining what his character, John Drake, would and would not do.

"We eventually did it without any of that rubbish in it," he said, and his strong feelings led to the most unusual – and fascinating – secret agent to appear among the 1960s crop of Napoleon Solos, John Steeds, and Simon Templars. "You never saw me fire a gun," he noted proudly. And he never dallied with the damsels. "I said to the producers, 'If I start going with a different girl in each episode, what are those kids going to think out there?"

The conversation went on for 45 minutes, as we ate our lunch and drank our coffee. McGoohan seemed easy-going and unthreatening, like a real person not a TV icon. At one point, he took a drag on his cigarette and stopped talking. The words had seemed to flow out of him; he spoke in that curious mid-Atlantic accent, slurring some words, emphasizing others. He talked about the creation of The Prisoner, the story of one man's fight against a dehumanizing system. McGoohan plays Number Six, a secret agent who resigns his job and is spirited away to a sea town known only as the Village. Everyone has a number instead of a name. "I'd always had these obsessions in the back of my mind for man in isolation, fight against bureaucracy, brainwashing, and numbers," remarked McGoohan. A visit to the Welsh resort town of Portmeirion, with its fairy tale-like buildings, inspired him; a talk with Sir Lew Grade fired him into action. Grade had financed Secret Agent and wanted McGoohan to do another adventure series. "I said, 'I don't want to do anything quite like that. I want to do something different.' He said, 'What?' So I said, 'This.' And I pulled out a script that I had prepared of the first episode of The Prisoner."

He said a lot more, but for me the memorable moments were the ones where he made me feel like a special friend (I'm sure this is an old actor's trick, but for an impressionable fan, it was heaven): when he noted at one point how perceptive I was, more so than most other people, and when he later hinted he might look at something I'd written and give his opinion, or see me in an improv comedy show. I'm sure he meant nothing by any of these things, but they made me feel like his pal. After the meal, as we walked back to his rehearsal studio, I stopped a passerby whom I asked to photograph McGoohan and me. I remember the moment, but even if I didn't, the pleasure and pride and excitement I felt in being with my idol is palpable to anyone looking at the photograph of that moment. Was there ever a greater nerd than me? "It's only a TV show," I want to yell back at that dopey-looking, smirking kid with the silly moustache. But to me then – and, I guess, to me, now and forever – McGoohan and The Prisoner represent a period that I can never recapture but am constantly trying to, a time when I was always 14 and heroes like McGoohan were always there to keep us safe. "I am not a number. I am a person." Indeed.

November 2008

TS in Portmeirion, Wales, 1990, location for The Prisoner. 

Secret Agent

SECRET AGENT AKA DANGER MAN Set 1 A & E Home Video

from SCARLET STREET, 2001

Patrick McGoohan’s first TV series, Secret Agent is best remembered today for Johnny Rivers’ catchy theme song, “Secret Agent Man,” which wailed, “They’ve given you a number and taken away your name.” That, ironically, was part of the premise of McGoohan’s better known cult show, The Prisoner, the story of a former spy held captive in a Disneyland of terror. Secret Agent (known as Danger Man in England) is unjustly ignored and is, in many ways, the superior series. Launched in 1961 as a half-hour drama, it was revived in 1964 as an hour program when the James Bond craze was in full swing. Never a roaring success, it ran for a respectable 45 episodes over two years. Secret Agent is unpretentious and smooth, a film noir-style spy show and the best of the spy crop that rose in the plentiful Bond-era 1960s. The series’ scripts are complex and witty – more John Le Carre spy-procedural than Ian Fleming super-spy serial– with agent John Drake (McGoohan) as something of an anti-hero, often questioning his superior’s values and the stated “necessity” for what he is doing. Drake is not a 007 clone, never kissing a girl and rarely using a gun. More often than not, he would talk rather than fight his way out of a sticky situation. McGoohan, who had turned down the Bond role in 1961 because of its sex and violence, is an impressive protagonist, thoughtful but also with a good left hook. This first collection of episodes features the top-notch “Fish on the Hook,” in which Drake must identify and rescue the mastermind behind Britain’s Middle Eastern spy network; “Yesterday’s Enemies,” a clever meditation on the double-dealing and changing alliances inherent in the spy game (“Yesterday’s enemies, today’s friends,” muses one character); “No Marks for Servility,” in which Drake masquerades as a servant for a ruthless financier; “Fair Exchange,” a spy mission involving assassination, a double-cross, and an old friend; “The Battle of the Cameras,” with a tuxedoed Drake in a casino as a Bond-type adventurer; and “A Room in the Basement,” a Mission: Impossible-style rescue operation. The series has a distinctive, noirish look, beautifully captured in this great DVD transfer from A & E. The series also has a wonderfully unique harpsichord score by Edwin Astley, as well as some familiar faces from the Bond films (Vladyek Shebal, Zena Marshall, both from From Russia With Love) and The Prisoner (Anton Rodgers, Jane Merrow, both from “The Schizoid Man”). But don’t expect to hear that Johnny Rivers title tune (except in the paltry DVD extras section): these episodes feature the original Danger Man titles. One person will probably be pleased about that: John Drake himself. McGoohan reportedly hated the song “Secret Agent Man.” – Tom Soter